More than six million people have been deported from the United States since 1996. The Dominican Republic is one of the top ten countries to which deportees are sent. Most scholarship on deportation focuses on the challenges deportees face post-deportation. There is also a long history of scholarship on how migrants draw from social, human and financial capital to integrate into host societies. This article thus asks what forms of capital are useful for deportees’ re-integration and focuses on the forms of capital deportees draw from to survive in the aftermath of deportation. An analysis of 60 in-depth interviews with Dominican deportees reveals how deportees’ combination of limited human capital, fractured social capital and positive psychological capital assists in their re-integration. Results also show that access to employment is not only an important step in social and economic integration, but that it also helps deportees to achieve emotional stability.

Research on the impacts of incarceration and deportation describes the negative consequences for children and young people. But how these events impact adults and members of extended families has not been broadly considered. And no study has directly compared incarceration with deportation. The study described in this essay, based on interviews with 111 adult individuals with a family member deported (57) or incarcerated (54), reveals how these experiences have long-lasting emotional and financial impacts and considers the similarities and differences between incarceration and deportation. The deportation or incarceration of parents is devastating; yet the absence of other relatives such as sons, sisters, brothers, aunts, cousins, grandchildren, and other household members also translates into severe sentimental and economic hardships not only for the immediate but also for the extended family.

Deportees' reintegration is shaped by the contexts of reception in their countries of origin and the strength of their ties to the United States. For some, the deprivation and isolation of deportation is akin to a death sentence.